Brazil’s President Works to Lend Popularity to a Protégée

GARANHUNS, Brazil — With less than three months until the presidential election, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is trying to make enough of his magic dust stick to his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, to persuade voters to elect her as the first female president of Brazil, Latin America’s largest country.

In campaigning for Ms. Rousseff, his former chief of staff, the president has flouted electoral laws and credited her for programs and public works done under his watch.

In a high school gymnasium here on Friday, a 20-minute drive from his birthplace, Mr. da Silva was in his element, crisscrossing a stage with a microphone and energizing 3,000 supporters with an improvised stump speech. “Today there is no one more prepared to govern our country than our future president, our comrade,” he declared, pointing to Ms. Rousseff, seated nearby.

Whether his lobbying will suffice is unclear. What does it take for a Latin American leader, even one as beloved as Mr. da Silva, to pass on popularity?

But in Brazil, Mr. da Silva seems to be betting that his almost cultlike following can make Ms. Rousseff win.

“The attitude is, ‘If Lula says she is the right person, she is the right person,’ ” said Riordan Roett, the director of the Latin American program at Johns Hopkins University. “I can’t think of any other case in Latin America in the recent past where this has been the case, where a twice-elected president was simply saying, ‘Trust me.’ ”

Brazil’s election has become deeply regional this year. Here in the northeast, Mr. da Silva helped lift millions of people from extreme poverty by greatly expanding subsidy programs. Many here in Garanhuns and Caetés, where he was born, say they will vote for Ms. Rousseff because Mr. da Silva wants it.

“We support Lula’s candidate,” said Severin João da Silva, a 57-year-old farmer in Caetés. “Lula was the best president Brazil has ever had, and after he became president everything got better.”

By contrast, José Serra, the São Paulo governor who is Ms. Rousseff’s chief competitor, is counting on strength in the more prosperous southeast.

Ms. Rousseff has no elected political experience, serving as energy minister before taking over as Mr. da Silva’s chief of staff in 2005. But with Mr. da Silva at her side, she drew even two months ago with Mr. Serra, who has run for president before, and briefly overtook him in one poll.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spoke last month in Brasília under an image of his choice for a successor, Dilma Rousseff.Credit
Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

That may be a linchpin in Mr. da Silva’s bid for continuity. In Uruguay, the economic stability created under President Tabaré Vázquez allowed José Mujica, a flower farmer and former guerrilla, to be elected under the governing Broad Front banner.

In Colombia, the unifying issue was security. Juan Manuel Santos, the former defense minister under the popular President Álvaro Uribe, was able to hold off a spirited anti-establishment challenge from a former Bogotá mayor, Antanas Mockus. Many voters seemed willing to give Mr. Uribe a “vote of gratitude” for reducing crime and standing up to rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.

But in Chile, the promise of continuity was not enough, and voters rejected Eduardo Frei, a staid former president from Ms. Bachelet’s Concertación coalition. He lost to Sebastián Piñera, a right-wing billionaire and former senator who vowed to deepen most of the social programs that had helped make Ms. Bachelet so popular. Voters sent the message that they were tired of 20 years of Concertación rule.

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Beyond that, neither Ms. Bachelet nor Mr. Uribe reached the “emotional depths of sheer allegiance and loyalty that Lula was able to inspire in a lot of Brazilians,” Mr. Shifter said.

Transferring that loyalty to Ms. Rousseff has been an “obsession” for Mr. da Silva, said Amaury de Souza, a political analyst in Rio de Janeiro.

In the past two years, the Brazilian president has tried to fashion Ms. Rousseff into a viable candidate, giving her control of a multibillion-dollar program for infrastructure projects and parading her at ribbon-cuttings and other public events.

On Friday night, in his 51-minute address, Mr. da Silva praised Ms. Rousseff’s managerial experience and related her biography, telling supporters she had been tortured by the military regime, noting that “Jesus Christ was tortured.”

Ms. Rousseff struggled to inspire the audience in her 24-minute address, which followed. She promised to “lift the people of the country, all of the people.”

She said that Mr. da Silva had given her “the most important opportunities in my life” and that his government had “carried out the biggest peaceful revolution this country has ever seen.”

Political analysts say Mr. da Silva is pushing harder to elect his successor than any other president in decades. But he has pushed limits. Electoral officials have fined Mr. da Silva four times in recent months for early campaigning for Ms. Rousseff.

Last week, Sandra Cureau, deputy attorney general for elections, warned that Mr. da Silva could be charged with abusing his political power for publicly crediting Ms. Rousseff this month with a high-speed rail project planned to connect Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

The president, in turn, responded by accusing the media and a prosecutor he did not identify — but clearly meaning Ms. Cureau — of trying to prevent him from campaigning. “What they want is to pressure me so that I pretend that I do not know my comrade Dilma,” he said.

In his own campaign, Mr. Serra has seemingly taken a page from Mr. da Silva’s playbook, vowing to increase significantly the number of families receiving subsidies and the amount of the payments. But he has also said that Mr. da Silva’s Workers’ Party had connections to the FARC. Mr. Serra’s running mate, Indio da Costa, even suggested that the Workers’ Party could be linked to drug trafficking, a comment that led a columnist in a Brazilian newspaper to call him “Serra Palin,” referring to the American vice-presidential candidate.

Ultimately, the election could turn on a wild card: Marina Silva, Mr. da Silva’s popular former environment minister, running on the Green Party ticket. If Ms. Silva can muster 12 to 15 percent, she could push the vote into a November runoff, Mr. de Souza said.

With his approval ratings hovering around 75 percent, President da Silva “would be unbeatable” if he were the candidate, Mr. de Souza said. “But it’s up to Dilma now.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2010, on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Brazil’s President Works to Lend Popularity to a Protégée. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe